1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to a user interface of a mobile telephone, and more particularly, to a mobile telephone which automatically rebuilds a menu tree such that a user can quickly and easily access a frequently used menu.
2. Description of the Related Art
As mobile telephones have diminished in size, certain hardware features of the mobile telephone have been compromised. For instance, with smaller displays, the number of characters that can be displayed at once is limited. Similarly, smaller input devices render it more difficult for users to input data. Despite such hardware limitations, current mobile telephones have an abundance of functions, and the number of such functions is expected to grow in the future. Thus, advanced user interfaces have been developed for mobile telephones for enabling a user to easily access the various functions in the limited hardware environment. In practice, the mobile telephone builds the various functions into a menu tree. With this approach, the user may search for a desired function by scrolling the menu tree using a scroll key on a keypad.
FIG. 1 illustrates a typical menu tree of a mobile telephone. As illustrated, menus A, B and C are "child" menus of a "parent" menu entry P, and they have a sibling relationship. Likewise, menu A is also a parent of the sibling child menus A1, A2; menu B is a parent of menus B1, B2, B3, and so forth. It is possible to move from one sibling menu to another sibling menu by using the scroll key on the keypad. Each time the user moves the scroll key, the display unit displays a message representing a function of a corresponding menu. While scrolling the menus, if the user selects a specific parent menu by pressing a select key on the keypad, the display unit displays a representative child menu (i.e., the first child menu displayed) of the selected menu. For example, on the assumption that a menu B1 is a representative child menu of the menu B, if the user presses the select key when the display unit displays the menu B, the display unit will display the representative child menu B1. In this manner, the user can select a desired function.
One shortcoming of the conventional menu tree is that it is fixed as designed by the manufacturer. Thus, for example, if the user more frequently uses a particular child menu (e.g., menu B3) more than the representative child menu (B1), he/she will press the scroll key several times to access the target child menu B3, which amounts to excessive work for the user.